Shaunda Necole's The Soul Food Pot: Where Every Recipe Is a Love Note to the Ancestors
The Soul Food Pot Heritage-rooted Southern soul food recipes reimagined for modern kitchens thesoulfoodpot.com
When Shaunda Necole calls herself a "gatekeeper protecting the legacies of African-American culture," she means it literally. The Virginia-born, Las Vegas-based author and soul food expert has built The Soul Food Pot into one of the most trusted resources for African American culinary heritage online, a place where recipes arrive not as instructions but as acts of preservation. Her tagline says it plainly: "Where Soul Food Tells Its Story."
That story traces back to her Great-Grandma Florence, a North Carolinian home cook whose one-woman catering operation fed entire communities. Florence's kitchen was a classroom where recipes passed not through measurements but through watching, tasting, and doing. Shaunda carries that legacy forward through over 300 recipes across her blog, six digital cookbooks, a podcast called The Soul Food Pod (the first dedicated to the history and culture of soul food dishes), and a forthcoming print cookbook arriving in bookstores in 2027.
What sets Shaunda apart from other food bloggers working in Southern cooking is her insistence on naming what she makes. She calls her recipes "Black folks' food," said with love and intention. Where others might soften the framing or generalize under the broad umbrella of "Southern cuisine," Shaunda credits the Black cooks, grandmothers, and communities who created and sustained these traditions. Every recipe title on her site reflects this: Black Folks Sweet Potato Pie, Black Folks Southern Fried Chicken, Black Folks Baked Macaroni and Cheese. The naming is the point.
Cooking as Cultural Memory
The Soul Food Pot is especially powerful during Black History Month, when Shaunda curates a dedicated collection of recipes organized around a simple premise: food has always been one of the most powerful ways Black history has been preserved. Her BHM page, updated for 2026 with 44 recipes, frames the kitchen as a site of memory. She writes about how cooking techniques were passed down when written records weren't an option, how the kitchen became a classroom, and how preparing these dishes today is itself an act of remembrance.
This isn't just thematic branding. Shaunda approaches each recipe with the storytelling instincts of a cultural historian. She contextualizes dishes within the experience of enslaved African Americans who transformed limited ingredients into nourishing meals, traces how those traditions evolved through the Great Migration and into modern kitchens, and explains why certain techniques persist. She also bridges heritage and practicality, with many of her recipes adapted for the Instant Pot, making soulful cooking accessible for busy households without sacrificing depth of flavor or cultural significance.
Two Recipes Worth Exploring
Black Folks Sweet Potato Pie Recipe
Shaunda Necole • The Soul Food Pot®
Black Folks Sweet Potato Pie The pie that tastes like home, adapted from family tradition and shared with precision thesoulfoodpot.com
This is the recipe that put The Soul Food Pot on the map, going viral in 2021 and becoming Shaunda's signature dish. Sweet potato pie holds a particular place in African American food culture, one that Shaunda treats with the seriousness it deserves. She walks readers through not just the technique but the meaning, connecting a creamy, cinnamon-kissed filling to the broader tradition of Black holiday tables and Sunday dinners. It's a masterclass in how a single dessert can carry the weight of generational memory.
Black History Month Recipes That Tell Our Story
Shaunda Necole • The Soul Food Pot®
Black History Month Recipes A curated collection of 44 heritage recipes with cultural context and cooking guidance thesoulfoodpot.com
More than a recipe roundup, this is Shaunda's most comprehensive statement of purpose. The page opens with historical context about the origins of soul food, explains why Black folks cook the way they do, and then organizes dozens of recipes into a meaningful menu: main dishes, sides, appetizers, desserts, and drinks. It functions as both a cooking resource and a cultural primer, the kind of page you'd return to every February and well beyond.
Why It Matters
The food blogs we've featured in this series tend to share a common thread: a single person's dedication to preserving a culinary tradition that might otherwise fade. Frank Fariello documents his grandmother Angelina's Campanian recipes. Lisa McLean works through Marcella Hazan's entire catalogue. Shaunda Necole is doing something similar, but the stakes feel different. African American culinary traditions have been systematically uncredited, absorbed into "Southern cooking" without acknowledgment of their origins. Shaunda's work is a deliberate corrective, one recipe at a time.
She describes her mission as writing "flavor-packed love notes to the ancestors." In a food media landscape that too often treats soul food as comfort food shorthand, The Soul Food Pot insists on the full picture: the history, the hardship, the creativity, the joy, and the ongoing responsibility to keep these traditions alive and properly attributed. That's worth celebrating, this month and every month.
Explore The Soul Food Pot: https://thesoulfoodpot.com
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